I. One of the fun parts of travel is how it can mix up one’s routine, which is why I found myself eating breakfast on a couch and watching CNN on a flat screen television a couple days ago. Neither I nor my friends who turned on the television were expecting something particularly mind-expanding; we […]

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”George W. Bush In the 2000 Presidential Election the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore came down to recounts, […]

I. What makes a government? What is a government but a set of legal structures providing services to an area in exchange for monopolistic power over what is allowed in that area? Those services include stability—generally in the form of contract and law enforcement—and public goods—most commonly as monetary policy. These services may be broader: […]

This article presents a particular method of analysis and family of social theories I find important. It also builds on the concept of expected value. I. Jane and The Canyon Jane is an explorer working her way through a forest. She has gear, food, and a general direction to travel, but the obstacles she will […]

The title of this post comes from the one and only Terry Pratchett, specifically the witch Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites, but it may as well be the mantra of the social sciences. My job as a policy analyst revolves, in part, around people’s misconceptions and thus this post: a list of the things I’ve recently […]

The Center for Investigative Reporting has a podcast called Reveal. If you aren’t listening to it you should change that, beginning with the recent episode Hunting the Ghost Fleet. At times it feels like a spy thriller, and it comes with some beautiful pictures too. If you listen now, the post will still be here […]

My last post was about changes in flight patterns from Atlanta to the rest of the United States. As these things can be a bit abstract, I took a break from my other projects (more on that at a later date) and made a map. It shows all of the direct flight routes between ATL […]

The following was written for an exercise I did as an application for a job at the Brookings Institute. I thought the data was interesting and worth posting. I also mapped the change. Something is happening in Georgia. The Atlanta Metropolitan Area is the 9th largest in the United States and has grown at a […]

Growing up in Portland, OR, I watched America’s largest town turn into America’s smallest city and in the process I have seen neighborhood after neighborhood radically change. These changes have not just been a decrease in people of color and increase in neighborhood income (though that is certainly part of it); rather they have involved […]

This has been a whirlwind week for followers of US and world politics. Out of all these stories, the biggest was probably the Singapore summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump (although the Czech President did call an impromptu press conference to burn a giant pair of underwear). The summit has highlighted the hypocrisy […]